Increasing reallocated sector count but SMART says good...

I agree with StephenB.

The vendors have a proprietary implementation on most of the SMART values, so it is hard to tell if something is wrong by looking at the raw values (in either hex or decimal). The meanings even vary depending upon drive type and even firmware revision on similar drives. Only the vendor (Seagate) can properly understand what is going on there.

However, I have never had a drive fail the SeaTools testing...so I am not sure how much value that really is for predicting failure. I think it is really more of documentation issue to get a drive RMA'd within the warranty period.

My rule of thumb is to use the following on SMART values as a reference point... If any of these are going up, I dump the drive for critical storage:

-01 - Read Error Rate *
-05 - Reallocated Sectors
-BB - Uncorrectable Errors
-BC - Command Timeout
-BF - G Sense Error rate *
-C3 - Hardware ECC recovered *
-C5 - Current Sector Pending
-C6 - Uncorrectable sector count

For Seagates, the "01 - Read Error Rate" should equal the "C3 - Hardware ECC recovered".
If it doesn't, that does not mean its bad, just that you have to look deeper at the hex values in the first 4 bits to see how bad it is, and watch those 4 bits.

Also for Seagates, I do not know how to read the command timeout values. I generally see numbers there on all drives, so I cannot imagine that every one of my Seagates is bad... however yours are kind of high for the amount of hours on the drive. Possibly this means a bad cable and/or your ReadyNAS is doing something wrong.

For "BF - G Sense error rates", I only care if it is rising when the drive is reading/writing while not being moved on a steady surface.

BackBlaze has done studies on this (google it), but reading SMART is kind of like reading tea leaves, IMHO.

SteveG

PS - I use CrystalDiskInfo or HDD Sentinel free versions to check SMART values. Some versions of CrystalDiskInfo have adware, so do some research before installing.